20 January 2008

Upon closer examination of Pinker's morality/science of the moral sense through his five spheres of harm, fairness, community, authority, and purity, I find his delineation of morality wobbles too unsteadily and on too many contingencies. Granted, he concedes that culture determines the ranking of the five spheres and that personal illusions and sanctimony can cloud the way to reaching common ground for moral understanding. However, the same can be said of ethnicity, race, and religion (factors perhaps more decisive than others in ranking the spheres), so why are they not specifically accounted for or categorized?

Just approach each sphere on a bare-bones logical basis, and we will begin to uncover the inherent problems:

(From Pinker's article, "The Moral Instinct, The Varieties of Moral Experience" published in The New York Times on 13 January 2008)

1) Harm - Sticking a pin into yours or your child's palm.

What he describes as self-mutilation or the infliction of pain, another might describe as acupuncture. In this case, one man's mutilation may be another nation's form of medicine.

A matter of culture, practice, and perspective...

2) Fairness - Accepting a TV from a friend who received it either from error or through theft.

Because this is not a good example - both are forms of theft - indirect or direct, theft is theft - I will supply my own examples:

Markus Frind is a 29-year old web entrepreneuer who works ten-hour weeks and earns about $10 million a year through his online dating site, Plenty of Fish (Randall Stross, "From 10 Hours A Week, $10 Million A Year," The New York Times, 13 January 2008).

In Yangmiao, China, it was recently reported that "people are too poor to heat their homes in the winter and many lack basic comforts like running water. Mobile phones, a near ubiquitous symbol of upward mobility throughout much of this country, are seen as an impossible luxury [...] ...experts say Henan and other heavily populated parts of the Chinese heartland are often excluded from the financial support that goes to the coastal areas, and what antipoverty measures there are have little effect. Typically, residents of those areas say, money intended for them is appropriated by corrupt local officials, wo pocket it or divert it to business investments" (Howard W. French, "Lives of Grinding Poverty, Untouched by China's Boom," The New York Times, 13 January 2008).

To those who might attribute the disparity between these two examples as a disparity between West and East, I will bring the case home to a domestic example:

Recently, GoldenTree Asset Management sued John Visconti and Ron Garber of payroll firm, Axium International Inc., because they and their ex-wives used Axium funds for their personal use, personal gifts, vacations, and in general, " 'as their own personal piggy bank to finance their extravegant lifestyles' " (Andrea Chang, "Suit accuses 2 ex-owners of payroll firm," Los Angeles Times, 16 January 2008). As a result, entertainment industry workers with Axium paychecks learned they were worthless, production companies were told that thousands of dollars were frozen in payroll accounts, and four hundred Axium employees were fired - via e-mail in a terse message telling them not to return to work, forget pension, forget accrued vacation, and forget any salary owed to them.

So here, the extravegancies of two at the sacrifice and livelihood of 400+...the moral fairness in this, please?

What is the fairness in a world where extraordinary wealth stands so mockingly parallel to grinding poverty, graft, and corruption? The fact that this disparity is so blatantly omnipresent is already a signal to the further degenerative repurcussions of morality, as per Nietzsche.

3) Community - Saying something bad about your nation - that you do not believe - either in your nation's radio station or in a foreign nation's radio station.

Again, because this is not a good example - both are deceitful because in both cases you are stating something you yourself do not believe, the geography is irrelevant -whether in Pars, Peru, or Pennsylvania, deceit is deceit - so I will supply my own examples:

Recently, it was reported that the Associated Press' Los Angeles assistant bureau chief issued an internal memorandum dictating coverage of Britney Spears, stating that " 'Now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal' " (Brian Stelter, "A.P. Says It Wants to Know Everything About Britney Spears," The New York Times, 14 January 2008).

Truly, there is a downfall of community when an article can be so casually published extolling the ease of accessibility in getting cosmetic procedures done - in a mall! (Janet Morrissey, "Having a Little Work Done (at the Mall)," The New York Times, 13 January 2008). Rather than comment on the resoundingly detrimental implications of this new reality, Morrissey instead discusses the ease, economy, and convenience this brings to consumers.

From bad to worse...

Advertisers and marketers in general have a rather 'tainted' image as it is. To splash some more mud on their facade, they are specifically targeting youths to market virtual worlds to "deliver quick growth, help keep movie franchises alive and instill brand loyalty in a generation of new customers" (Brooks Barnes, "Web Playgrounds of the Very Young," The New York Times, 31 December 2007).

4) Purity - Attending a performance-art piece that includes idiotic behavior or one that includes animalistic behavior, nudity, and urination.

Personal preferences aside, performance-art and art in general, must of necessity hold to an entirely different rubric than normative standards because it wells from an individual's expression and his right to that expressive tendency that secures his artistry. To deny this would be to suffocate that spring. All this being stated, it does not take an idiot to understand the point. And again, the point to this sphere wobbles on too many contingencies to make a categorical delineation and imperative of what is (im)moral purity.

5) Authority - Slap a friend or slap a minister in the face with their consent, in the name of comedy.

Again, this is not a good example because if an act is done with the consent of both parties - moreover, in the name of comedy - morality can not be at issue.

On moral authority, Weber examined it best. Suffice to note that the slippery marble upon which this sphere rests leads to far too many pratfalls.  Indeed, moral authority is affected by so many contingencies - ethnicity, race, faith, myth, illusion, sanctimony, and ultimately, perspective - that this is perhaps the most variegated of the five morality themas.

Case in point: elementary grade teacher naming a bear and causing a whole nation to call for her execution.

Beyond this, there is an even greater - dare say, fatal - flaw to this particular sphere: the fatality of hypocrisy. Unfortunately, there is too much of this around us today, further proving Nietzsche true...